Marco Rubio said his liberal critics show their “hypocrisy” when they cite science and label him a climate-change denier when they decline to embrace the science of human life beginning at conception.

In an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday afternoon, the Florida senator brushed off a backlash labeling him as a climate-change denier by aggressively accusing left-leaning critics as hypocrites given their abortion rights positions. He said emphatically that the “science is settled” that life begins at conception but that liberals “will never admit” to it

“Let me give you a bit of settled science that they’ll never admit to. The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life begins at conception,” Rubio said. “So I hope the next time someone wags their finger about science, they’ll ask one of these leaders on the left: ‘Do you agree with the consensus of science that human life begins at conception?’”

Rubio is responding to a firestorm over his Sunday show comments in which he said that cap-and-trade legislation will hurt the economy, not heal the environment. He told Hannity on Wednesday that he believes the climate is changing, but disagrees with the notion that science proves humans are causing it.

Rubio also said that President Barack Obama and his administration use catastrophic events as an excuse to push climate regulations.

“You’ll have a tornado somewhere or a drought and you’ll have the president or his supporters show up and say: ‘This is happening because of climate change,’” Rubio said. “As if to imply that if we eviscerate our economy by imposing cap-and-trade, these things will stop happening. That’s ridiculous.”